Fevre Dream (3 page)

They were waiting when Sour Billy led her in.

Nine of them were on hand, including Julian himself; six men, three women, the men in dark suits of European cut, the women in pale silken gowns. Except for Julian, they waited on the staircase, still and silent, respectful. Sour Billy knew them all: the pale women who called themselves Adrienne and Cynthia and Valerie, dark handsome Raymond with the boy’s face, Kurt whose eyes burned like hot coals, all the others. One of them, Jean, trembled slightly as he waited, his lips pulled back from long white teeth, his hand moving in small spasms. The thirst was on him badly, but he did not act. He waited for Damon Julian. All of them waited for Damon Julian.

Julian walked across the ballroom to the slave girl Emily. He moved with the stately grace of a cat. He moved like a lord, like a king. He moved like darkness flowing, liquid and inevitable. He was a dark man, somehow, though his skin was very pale; his hair was black and curling, his clothing somber, his eyes glittering flint.

He stopped before her and smiled. Julian had a charming, sophisticated smile. “Exquisite,” he said simply.

Emily blushed and stammered. “Shut up,” Sour Billy told her sharply. “Don’t you talk unless Mister Julian tells you to.”

Julian ran his finger along one soft, dark cheek, and the girl trembled and tried to stand still. He stroked her hair languidly, then raised her face toward his and let his eyes drink from her own. At that Emily shied and cried out with alarm, but Julian placed his hands on either side of her face, and would not let her look away. “Lovely,” he said. “You are beautiful, child. We appreciate beauty here, all of us.” He released her face, took one of her small hands in his own, raised it, and turned it over and bowed to plant a soft kiss on the inside of her wrist.

The slave girl was still shaking, but she did not resist. Julian turned her slightly, and gave her arm to Sour Billy Tipton. “Will you do the honors, Billy?”

Sour Billy reached behind him, and pulled the knife from the sheath in the small of his back. Emily’s dark eyes bulged wide and frightened and she tried to pull away, but he had a firm grip on her and he was fast, very fast. The blade had scarcely come into view and suddenly it was wet; a single swift slash across the inside of her wrist, where Julian had planted his lips. Blood welled from the wound and began to drip onto the floor, the patters loud in the stillness of the ballroom.

Briefly the girl whimpered, but before she quite knew what was happening Sour Billy had sheathed his knife and stepped away and Julian had taken her hand again. He raised her slim arm up once more, and bent his lips to her wrist, and began to suck.

Sour Billy retreated to the door. The others left the stair and came closer, the women’s gowns whispering softly. They stood in a hungry circle about Julian and his prey, their eyes dark and hot. When Emily lost consciousness, Sour Billy sprang forward and caught her beneath the arms, supporting her. She weighed almost nothing at all.

“Such beauty,” Julian muttered when he broke free of her, lips moist, eyes heavy and sated. He smiled.

“
Please,
Damon,” implored the one called Jean, shaking like a man with the fever.

Blood ran slowly, darkly down Emily’s arm as Julian gave Jean a cold, malignant stare. “Valerie,” he said, “you are next.” The pale young woman with the violet eyes and yellow gown came forward, knelt daintily, and began to lick at the terrible flow. Not until she had licked the arm clean did she press her mouth to the open wound.

Raymond went next, by Julian’s leave, then Adrienne, then Jorge. Finally, when the others were done, Julian turned to Jean with a smile and a gesture. He fell on her with a stifled sob, wrenching her from Sour Billy’s embrace, and began to tear at the soft flesh of her throat. Damon Julian grimaced with distaste. “When he is done,” he told Sour Billy, “clean it up.”

CHAPTER THREE

New Albany, Indiana,
June 1857

The mists were thick on the river and the air damp and chilly. It was just after midnight when Joshua York, finally arrived from St. Louis, met Abner Marsh in the deserted boatyards of New Albany. Marsh had been waiting for almost half an hour when York appeared, striding out of the fog like some pale apparition. Behind him, silent as shadows, came four others.

Marsh grinned toothily. “Joshua,” he said. He nodded curtly to the others. He had met them briefly back in April, in St. Louis, before he had taken passage to New Albany to supervise the building of his dream. They were York’s friends and traveling companions, but an odder bunch Marsh had never met. Two of them were men of indeterminate age with foreign names that he could neither remember nor pronounce; he called ’em Smith and Brown, to York’s amusement. They were always yapping at each other in some outlandish gibble-gabble. The third man, a hollow-cheeked Easterner who dressed like a mortician, was called Simon and never spoke at all. The woman, Katherine, was said to be a Britisher. She was tall and kind of stooped, with a sickly, decaying look to her. She reminded Marsh of a great white vulture. But she was York’s friend, all of them were, and York had warned him that he might have peculiar friends, so Abner Marsh held his tongue.

“Good evening, Abner,” York said. He stopped and glanced around the yards, where the half-built steamers lay like so many skeletons amid the gray flowing mists. “Cold night, isn’t it? For June?”

“That it is. You come far?”

“I’ve taken a suite at the Galt House over in Louisville. We hired a boat to take us across the river.” His cool gray eyes studied the nearest steamboat with interest. “Is this one ours?”

Marsh snorted. “This little thing? Hell no, that’s just some cheap stern-wheeler they’re building for the Cincinnati trade. You don’t think I’d put no damned stern-wheel on
our
boat, do you?”

York smiled. “Forgive my ignorance. Where is our boat, then?”

“Come this way,” Marsh said, gesturing broadly with his walking stick. He led them half across the boatyard. “There,” he said, pointing.

The mists gave way for them, and there she stood, high and proud, dwarfing all the other boats around her. Her cabins and rails gleamed with fresh paint pale as snow, bright even in the gray shroud of fog. Way up on her texas roof, halfway to the stars, her pilot house seemed to glitter; a glass temple, its ornate cupola decorated all around with fancy woodwork as intricate as Irish lace. Her chimneys, twin pillars that stood just forward of the texas deck, rose up a hundred feet, black and straight and haughty. Their feathered tops bloomed like two dark metal flowers. Her hull was slender and seemed to go on forever, with her stern obscured by the fog. Like all the first-class boats, she was a side-wheeler. Set amidship, the huge curved wheelhouses loomed gigantic, hinting at the vast power of the paddle wheels concealed within them. They seemed all the larger for want of the name that would soon be emblazoned across them.

In the night and the fog, amid all those smaller, plainer boats, she seemed a vision, a white phantom from some riverman’s dream. She took the breath away, Marsh thought as they stood there.

Smith was gibbling and Brown was gabbling back at him, but Joshua York just looked. For the longest time he looked, and then he nodded. “We have created something beautiful, Abner,” he said.

Marsh smiled.

“I had not expected to find her so close to finished,” York said.

“This is New Albany,” said Marsh. “That’s why I came here, instead of one of the boatyards in St. Louis. They been buildin’ steamboats here since I was a boy, built twenty-two of ’em just last year, probably have almost that many this year. I knew they could do the job for us. You should have been here. I came in with one of those little chests of gold, and I dumped it all over the superintendent’s desk, and I says to him, I says, ‘I want a steamer built, and I want it built
quick,
and I want it to be the fastest and prettiest and best damn heller of a boat that you ever damn built, you hear? Now you get me some engineers, your best, I don’t care if you got to drag ’em out of some cathouse over to Louisville, you get ’em to me tonight, so we can begin. And you get me the best damn carpenters and painters and boilermakers and all the damn rest, cause if I get anything
but
the best, you’re goin’ to be a mighty sorry man.’ ” Marsh laughed. “You should of seen him, didn’t know whether to look at that gold or lissen to me, both scared him half to death. But he did us right, that he did.” He nodded toward the boat. “Course, she’s not finished. Trim needs to be painted, goin’ do it up mostly in blue and silver, to go with all that silver you wanted in the saloon. And we’re still waitin’ on some of the fancy furniture and mirrors you ordered from Philadelphia, and such things. But mostly she’s done, Joshua, mostly she’s ready. Come, I’ll show you.”

Workmen had abandoned a lantern atop a pile of lumber near the stern of the boat. Marsh struck a match on his leg, lit the lantern, and thrust it imperiously at Brown. “Here, you, carry this,” he said brusquely. He went clomping heavily up a long board onto the main deck, the others trailing behind. “Careful what you touch,” he said, “some of the paint’s still wet.”

The lowest, or main, deck was full of machinery. The lantern burned with a clear, steady light, but Brown kept moving it around, so the shadows of the hulking machines seemed to shift and jump ominously, as if they were things alive. “Here, hold that still,” Marsh commanded. He turned to York and began to point, his stick jabbing like a long hickory finger toward the boilers, great metal cylinders that ran along either side of the forepart of the deck. “Eighteen boilers,” Marsh said proudly, “three more than the
Eclipse
. Thirty-eight-inch diameters, twenty-eight-foot long, each of ’em.” His stick waggled. “Furnaces are all done up with firebrick and sheet iron, got ’em up on brackets clear of the deck, cuts down on the chance of fires.” He traced the path of the steam lines overhead, running from the boilers back to the engines, and they all turned toward the stern. “We got thirty-six-inch cylinders, high pressure, and we got ourselves an eleven-foot stroke, same as the
Eclipse
. This boat is goin’ chew up that old river something terrible, I tell you.”

Brown gabbled, Smith gibbled, and Joshua York smiled.

“Come on up,” Marsh said. “Your friends don’t seem too interested in the engines, but they ought to like it just fine upstairs.”

The staircase was wide and ornate, polished oak with graceful fluted banisters. It began up near the bow, its width hiding the boilers and engines from those boarding, then broke in two and curled gracefully to either side to open on the second, or boiler, deck. They walked along the starboard side, with Marsh and his stick and Brown and the lantern leading the way, their boots clacking on the hardwood deck of the promenade as they marveled at the fine gothic detail of the pillars and the guard rails, all the painstakingly shaped wood, carved with flowers and curlicues and acorns. Stateroom doors and windows ran fore and aft in a long, long row; the doors were dark walnut, the windows stained glass. “Staterooms aren’t furnished yet,” Marsh said, opening a door and leading them into one, “but we’re getting nothing but the best, featherbeds and feather pillows, a mirror and an oil lamp for each room. Our cabins are larger than usual, too—won’t be able to take quite as many passengers as some other boat our size, but they’ll have more room.” He smiled. “We can charge ’em more too.”

Each cabin had two doors; one leading out onto the deck, the other inward, to the grand saloon, the main cabin of the steamer. “Main cabin isn’t near finished,” Marsh said, “but come look at it anyway.”

They entered and stopped, while Brown raised the lantern to cast light all up and down the vast, echoing length of it. The grand saloon extended the length of the boiler deck, continuous and unobstructed except by a midship gangway. “Fore portion is the gents’ cabin, aft for the ladies,” Marsh explained. “Take a look. Ain’t done yet, but she’ll be something. That marble bar there is forty foot long, and we’re going to put a mirror behind it just as big. Got it on order now. We’ll have mirrors on every stateroom door too, with silver frames around ’em, and a twelve-foot-high mirror there, at the aft end of the ladies’ cabin.” He pointed upward with his stick. “Can’t see nothing now, with it being dark and all, but the skylights are stained glass, run the whole length of the cabin. We’re going to put down one of them Brussels carpets, and carpets in all the staterooms too. We got a silver water cooler with silver cups that’s going to stand on a fancy wooden table, and we got a grand piano, and brand new velvet chairs, and real linen tablecloths. None of it is here yet, though.”

Even empty of carpeting, mirrors, and furniture, the long cabin had a splendor to it. They walked down it slowly, in silence, and in the moving light of the lantern bits of its stately beauty suddenly took form from the darkness, only to vanish again behind them: The high arched ceiling with its curving beams, carved and painted with detail as fine as fairy lace. Long rows of slim columns flanking the stateroom doors, trimmed with delicate fluting. The black marble bar with its thick veins of color. The oily sheen of dark wood. The double row of chandeliers, each with four great crystal globes hanging from a spiderweb of wrought iron, wanting only oil and a flame and all those mirrors to wake the whole saloon to glorious, glittering light.

“I thought the cabins too small,” Katherine said suddenly, “but this room will be grand.”

Marsh frowned at her. “The cabins are big, ma’am. Eight foot square. Six is usual. This is a steamer, you know.” He turned away from her, pointed with his walking stick. “Clerk’s office will be all the way forward there, the kitchen and the washrooms are by the wheelhouses. I know just the cook I want to get, too. Used to work on my Lady Liz.”

The roof of the boiler deck was the hurricane deck. They walked up a narrow stair and emerged forward of the great black iron smokestacks, then up a shorter stair to the texas deck, which ran back from the stacks to the wheelhouses. “Crew’s cabins,” Marsh said, not bothering with a tour. The pilot house stood atop the texas. He led them up and in.

From here, the whole yards were visible; all the lesser boats wrapped in mist, the black waters of the Ohio River beyond, and even the distant lights of Louisville, ghostly flickers in the fog. The interior of the pilot house was large and plush. The windows were of the best and clearest glass, with stained glass trim around them. Everywhere shone dark wood, and polished silver pale and cold in the lantern light.

And there was the wheel. Only the top half of it was visible, so huge was it, and even that stood as high as Marsh himself, while the bottom half was set in a slot in the floorboards. It was fashioned of soft black teak, cool and smooth to the touch, and the spokes wore ornamental silver bands like a dancehall girl wears garters. The wheel seemed to cry out for a pilot’s hands.

Joshua York came up to the wheel and touched it, running a pale hand over the black wood and silver. Then he took hold of it, as if he were a pilot himself, and for a long moment he stood like that, the wheel in his hands and his gray eyes brooding as they stared out into the night and the unseasonable June fog. The others all fell silent, and for a brief moment Abner Marsh could almost feel the steamboat move, over some dark river of the mind, on a voyage strange and endless.

Joshua York turned then, and broke the spell. “Abner,” he said, “I would like to learn to steer this boat. Can you teach me to pilot?”

“Pilot, eh?” Marsh said, surprised. He had no difficulty imagining York as a master and a captain, but piloting was something else—yet somehow the very asking made him warm to his partner, made him understandable after all. Abner Marsh knew what it was to want to pilot. “Well, Joshua,” he said, “I’ve done my share of piloting, and it’s the grandest feeling in the world. Being a captain, that ain’t nothin’ to piloting. But it ain’t something you just pick up, if you know what I’m saying.”

“The wheel looks simple enough to master,” York said.

Marsh laughed. “Hell yes, but it’s not the wheel you got to learn. It’s the river, York, the river. The old Mississippi hisself. I was a pilot for eight years, before I got my own boats, licensed for the upper Mississippi and the Illinois. Never for the Ohio, though, or the lower Mississippi, and for all I knew about steamboatin’ I couldn’t have piloted no boat on those rivers to save my life—didn’t know ’em. Those I did know, it took me years to learn ’em, and the learnin’ never stopped. By now I been out of the pilot house for so long that I’d have to learn ’em all over again. The river changes, Joshua, that it does. Ain’t never the same twice in a row, and you got to know every inch of it.” Marsh strolled to the wheel and put one of his own hands on it, fondly. “Now, I plan to pilot this boat, at least once. I dreamed about her too long not to want to take her in my hands. When we go against the
Eclipse,
I mean to stand a spell in the pilot house, that I do. But she’s too grand a boat for anything but the New Orleans trade, and that means the lower river, so I’m going to have to start learnin’ myself, learn every damn foot. Takes time, takes work.” He looked at York. “You still want to pilot, now that you know what it means?”

“We can learn together, Abner,” York replied.

York’s companions were growing restless. They wandered from window to window, Brown shifting the lantern from one hand to the other, Simon as grim as a cadaver. Smith said something to York in their foreign tongue. York nodded. “We must be going back,” he said.

Marsh glanced around one final time, reluctant to leave even now, and led them from the pilot house.

When they had trudged partway through the boatyards, York turned and looked back toward their steamboat where she sat on her pilings, pale against the darkness. The others stopped as well, and waited silently.

“Do you know Byron?” York asked Marsh.

Marsh thought a minute. “Know a fellow named Blackjack Pete used to pilot on the
Grand Turk
. I think his last name was Brian.”